JOHANNESBURG >> His
head shrouded by a sports hoodie, the young man walked unnoticed through
a bustling crowd outside the gates of the Olympic village in London
last year. When he got close, I saw a familiar face smiling at me.

It was Oscar Pistorius. "Gerald!" he called and then raised both hands for a double high-five greeting followed by a hug.

On
Feb. 14, I saw Pistorius in a hood again, and this time he stared
straight at the ground, hands thrust into the pockets of a gray sports
jacket. He was flanked by officers as he left a police station. Hours
earlier, he'd been charged with killing his girlfriend.

It is hard
to reconcile the easygoing, charismatic man I interviewed on several
occasions with the man accused of premeditated murder in the shooting of
Reeva Steenkamp in his South African home. Prosecutors painted him as a
man prone to anger and violence, though he had no prior criminal
record. The Olympian says he shot Steenkamp by mistake, thinking she was
a nighttime intruder, while prosecutors allege he intentionally shot
her after the couple argued.

Who is Oscar Pistorius? I thought I
had some idea, and in a sense, so did the millions around the world who
cheered the double-amputee athlete as a symbol of determination over
adversity.

Now he is as much of a mystery as whatever happened in his home in the early hours of Valentine's Day.

My
meeting with Pistorius in London was one of several in the three years I
have been covering his remarkable story for The Associated Press, from
South Africa to Italy to London — and last week to Courtroom C on the
first floor of the red-bricked and gray-walled Pretoria Magistrate's
Court in the South African capital.

On reflection, Pistorius'
narrative is partly an exploration of how hard it is to truly know
someone who lives so much in the public eye. Journalists witnessed or
heard reports of occasional flashes of anger — with hindsight, do they
loom as potentially more meaningful? At the time the outbursts passed
largely unnoticed.

What I do know is that the public Pistorius seemed to have a soft spot.

Weeks
before his debut at the Olympics, he stopped an interview with me to
talk to a little girl who walked up to give him a strawberry from the
gardens of the rural hotel at his training base in Gemona, in northern
Italy.

"Oscar, Oscar," the little girl said, holding out the
berry. Behind her, a woman called the child away to stop her from
bothering Pistorius.

"Ciao, baba. Grazie," Pistorius replied with a
smile, unfazed by the interruption, showing off his Italian and
pretending to eat the strawberry.

"She brings me something to eat every night," he told me delightedly, pointing up to the windows of his hotel room.

Now
the world knows Pistorius owns a 9 mm Parabellum pistol, licensed for
self-defense, and that he applied for licenses to own six more guns —
listed for his private collection — weeks before the shooting death of
Steenkamp.

His relationships with women have been spread over the gossip pages in South Africa.

We
spoke about his running, his love of sneakers and nice clothes but also
about his history with fast cars and motorbikes and the high-speed boat
crash in 2009 that left him in a serious condition in the hospital with
head wounds. He conceded that the crash caused him to rethink how he
lived.

"I just realized that I need to make some changes and some
of them need to be with my lifestyle," Pistorius told me last year in
that interview in northern Italy. "I was messing around a lot with
motorbikes and just playing around and taking unnecessary risks."

Again
with hindsight, was he grappling with anything deeper than just the
high spirits and penchant for thrills of many young men flushed with
success and money to burn?

Covering Pistorius' track career, he
became more comfortable with me, remembering my name and shouting it
when he would see me among a pack of journalists.

During his
Olympic preparations in Italy, Pistorius pulled out his cellphone to
show me pictures of his bleeding leg stumps, rubbed raw from the
friction of pounding around the track on his blades.

It was around
the time when people were again questioning whether he should be
allowed to run in the 400 meters against able-bodied athletes. The
message in showing these graphic photos was: Do you still think I have
an unfair advantage?

Until that moment, I hadn't fully realized
what Pistorius went through every time he slipped on his prosthetic
blades to compete or train. Not many people had, I guess.

It was
rare for Pistorius to show images of his amputated limbs, but he grinned
and shrugged. He said it was just part of the job.

It took a long
time for him to get used to people filming and taking photographs of
him putting on his carbon-fiber blades. He used to ask people not to
film him without his prosthetics.

When he finished a race at the
South African national championships last year, he quickly disappeared
to a secluded part of the track to swap his blades for artificial legs,
complete with sponsored sneakers that his agent was holding for him. It
was his regular post-race routine. He then came bounding back to give me
an interview.

He often apologized when he had to end an interview
because he was running out of time. It always seemed people wanted more
of his time than he could give. After we talked in London, Pistorius
stayed a little longer to pose for photographs with Olympic security
staff, even convincing one shy lady to get into one of the pictures.

Then he popped on his identity-concealing hood and, on his prosthetic legs, he walked off, anonymous in the crowd.

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